Hirschl & Adler Galleries of New York is in the business of selling beautiful paintings, drawings and sculpture, furniture, and decorative arts from the 18th to the early 20th centuries.

But the firm, now celebrating its 65th anniversary, is equally intent on extending the known scholarship and history of artwork created during America’s Neo-Classical period, which was roughly from the first years of the 19th century to the early 1840s.

Augmenting the Canon: Recent Acquisitions of American Neo-Classical Decorative Arts is Hirschl and Adler’s eighth exhibition since 1991 dedicated to the period’s furniture and decorative arts, including silver, lighting, ceramics, and glass.

As the name implies, the show brings forward pieces that haven’t been seen for years, works that inform what was previously known about cabinetmakers and artists who were working at the time.

“As long as we're discovering new examples at the very, very top level of production, we have to share those with people so that they better understand local style, and the hand of the craftsman that was working,” says Elizabeth Feld, director of furniture and decorative arts at the firm.

The works on display also illuminate how American families once collected and lived with the items they acquired. In their gallery space in Manhattan’s Fuller Building, a known destination for fine art dealers, a room dedicated primarily to works created in Boston includes a curved, Mahogany “pier table,” made around 1818 to 1820, and attributed to Thomas Seymour, a cabinet maker who worked for Isaac Vose & Son from 1819-1825. The table is priced at $95,000.

A rendering of The Daniel P. Parker Family in the Front Parlor of their Home at 40 Beacon Street, Boston, made from free-hand cut black paper and graphite pencil drawings, by the artist Augustin-Amant-Constant Fidèle Edouart, is displayed in the gallery, and shows a similar pier table along one wall.

The artwork (not for sale) also shows a round center table similar to one from Isaac Vose & Son displayed in Hirschl & Adler’s gallery, which is now selling for $75,000.

The two tables are not an exact match to the tables drawn by Edouart, Feld says, but “we know that this is the parlor of the Parker family and they lived on Beacon Street in Boston. We know exactly which house. We know who they bought furniture from, we know who their next door neighbors bought furniture from, and they bought their furniture from Vose.”

Feld notes that both tables originated from the renowned Boston cabinetmaker’s shop.

“We were able to put this and that together and show how these things were used in the home,” Feld says.

Another reason to create a show? “We're finding new material,” she says.

Among the new pieces is a rare “box sofa,” attributed to Duncan Phyfe, a New York craftsman who is perhaps the most well-known of the American Neo-Classical furniture makers. The sofa is rare because it’s made from Rosewood instead of Mahogany, which was typical, and features a flat crest rail instead of the more typically rounded one.

What’s unusual is that Hirschl & Adler seems to have discovered the mate of a box sofa it had acquired 20 years ago and sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, given that both sofas have the exact, unusual details. They likely faced each other in a room with a table in the middle, Feld says.

“When you think about the configuration of a room, it would make sense that this would have had an original mate,” she says. “It’s a brand new discovery. No one has seen it.”

When Feld began working at Hirschl & Adler 20 years ago, her father, Stuart Feld, was helping clients put together period rooms representing the paintings, furniture, and decorative arts, all from one historical period. The elder Feld, Hirschl & Adler’s president, is celebrating his 50th year with the firm.

“He would sell them 15 pieces of furniture for a room and three chandeliers and my mother would help design the curtains with their decorator because they didn't know 1820 drapery design,” she says.

Today, collectors are more apt to take a single piece, like the box sofa, or an extraordinary Récamier, a Mahogany sofa (selling for $135,000) with detailed, “flat and crisp” carving indicative of Philadelphia’s cabinetmakers of the early 1800s, and build a contemporary room around it.

“There are private collectors who are still crazy about this stuff,” Feld says. “They are not necessarily putting period rooms together anymore, but really focusing on a few important examples. It's been a lot of fun working with the decorators to help them find sort of that focal point in a room.”

Augmenting the Canon: Recent Acquisitions of American Neo-Classical Decorative Arts, an exhibition of about 60 masterworks, will be on display at Hirschl & Adler, Fuller Building, 41 E. 57th St., New York, from Thursday, Dec. 13, to Wednesday, Feb. 6.

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